More "Head Seek" Noise With Cachecard?

[yungee]

I put a cachecard with 128Mb of memory into my Tivo earlier today.

Watching TV tonight I've noticed that I can hear the hard drive heads "ticking about" more than I noticed before. (It's a Maxtor 200Gb drive with accoustic settings set to "quiet")

Is this...

a) Due to the cachecard reading from other areas of the disk while it's playing back?
b) Due to the small hole the network cable pokes through that's now letting more sound out from the case?
c) Due to me being over sensitive because of the change and listening out for noise more than usual?
d) Something else?

If it's "a" I think I might have to pull the cache memory out.
What is it caching exactly? 128Mb is an awful lot of plain text.

[blindlemon]

The cachecard should reduce head seeks rather than increase them, as less reads of the database will come from the drive.

I'd put my money on c) ;)

[Pete77]

It's a Maxtor 200Gb drive with accoustic settings set to "quiet"

A Maxtor with acoustics set to quiet is still very noisy though.

If you fit a near silent disk like a 400Gb Samsung HD LD then your noise problems will disappear for good.

[yungee]

I think I've worked out the primary reason, but I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about it on this forum.

Without wanting to go into any discussion about it, may I just say "inserting a video from another Tivo while recording something else and watching yet a third thing causes the heads to jump all over the shop, which is a Bad Thing (tm)"

.... However, as sod's law would have it, my upstairs Tivo hard drive died overnight last night (yes, really!), so I'll get one of those quiet drives and do a swapsie!

Top tip: Don't use an old 60Gb drive you'd had sitting on a shelf for a year and you aren't sure why! There's a reason that you put it there. Because it's a failing piece of junk! :o

Edit: After the recommendation above from Pete, I've had a look around for some reviews of the Samsung drive and found a site that actually has audio recordings of the noise the drives make, alongside the review. Very handy.

WD Caviar SE16: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article617-page1.html
Samsung Spinpoint T Series: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article657-page1.html

[BrianHughes]

...
After the recommendation above from Pete, I've had a look around for some reviews of the Samsung drive and found a site that actually has audio recordings of the noise the drives make, alongside the review. Very handy.



And thought I was a geek :D

[Pete77]

I don't know what kind of microphone they were using as I can't hear that kind of head seek noise even 6 inches away from my Samsung drives.

Still good to know that the 400Gb Samsung drive meets with Silent PC's approval.

[yungee]

And thought I was a geek :D

Heh. I actually say there and listened to all of the recordings too :o

Great to get some idea of what to expect, so top marks to them for thoroughness! :up:

[yungee]

I don't know what kind of microphone they were using as I can't hear that kind of head seek noise even 6 inches away from my Samsung drives.

That's the noise they make when you're thrashing the knackers off it with a hefty seek test. The Tivo should seek relatively rarely compared to PC use, as it's unusual to have a machine filled with primarily huge files.

Still good to know that the 400Gb Samsung drive meets with Silent PC's approval.

Indeed. Thanks for the pointer towards it in the first place.

[blindlemon]

The 400gb Samsung HD400LD is indeed a pretty quiet drive :up:

Not as quiet as the now discontinued 250gb HA250JC, but very quiet for a 400gb drive nevertheless.